How to make pdfsam work in Xubuntu 16.04?

Question

I apt-get install pdfsam in 16.04. It doesn't work with the OpenJDK 9 (preinstalled). Author's site says it works with JDK8. So i did:

 sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk

That didn't work ,so i tried:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre

Still nothing. Nada. Any ideas what i did wrong?

What happens when you open a terminal window and run pdfsam? Please edit your post to include any messages that appear. — Nick Weinberg, Jun 09 '16 at 17:52
Make sure you have openjfx installed as well, PDFsam requires Java8 with JavaFX. — Andrea Vacondio, Jun 16 '16 at 21:12

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 01 '18 at 07:55

I had no desire to change the system default so the fix to make pdfsam run is simply to add to your home bin directory a shell script which starts it using the the right Java flavor. Here is what I did:

$ cat ~/bin/pdfsam
#!/bin/bash
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64
export JAVACMD=$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin/java
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

/usr/bin/pdfsam

and all works fine thereafter. Even my menu shortcut works fine which pleased me (clearly did not point at the /usr/bin/pdfsam script).

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 20 '16 at 19:49

0

If you have multiple Java versions installed, you can set the version used by default.

Use the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

edited Jun 20 '16 at 19:49

dufte

14,258

answered Jun 20 '16 at 19:44

Josi Coder

1

How to make pdfsam work in Xubuntu 16.04?

2 Answers2